Journal > Dispatch #35 (January 2026)

Posted 2026-01-08 under #dispatch

Happy new year! Big month. My girl turned four, which is somehow both shockingly old and young. Sometimes I look at her and think, I can’t believe you’re not still two. Other times she says things and I think, I can’t believe you’re not, like, twelve. We threw her a party at Hyper Kidz, then my folks took her to Asheville for a few days.

A child with curly blond hair, wearing a pink dress over a magenta shirt, sits beneath balloons at a bright pink table with a slice of pizza on a paper plate. Two adults and a child stand beside a large crouching wooden sculpture with an upside-down green wheeled bin covering its head and two holes for eyes, outdoors among trees.

We spent Christmas in Greensboro with Claire’s family. In addition to all the good family time, the highlight was Winter Wonderlights at the Greensboro Science Center (and so many presents). Then we spent a few days down at Lake Norman with Claire’s grandmother. We went to a Gabby’s Dollhouse interactive experience, which is pretty big in our house these days.

A child with curly blond hair holds a pink toy pony, mouth open as white flakes fall around them. Colorful lights and a large reflective circular sculpture stand in the background at night. A young child with a pink pacifier holds a toy strawberry at a play kitchen counter with colorful bowls, toy fruit, an egg carton, and a large blue mixing bowl with a wooden spoon.

Music

Here’s a track I made in December, called “Signal Drift”:

I’m pretty happy with the last few things I’ve recorded. I can hear a real progression from the stuff I was making a year ago. Getting comfortable in Ableton has been a big boost, having discrete creation and refinement phases.

I also made this little medley for a company event:

I tracked everything out on my synths, but then, rather than recording the audio, I just sent the MIDI data into Ableton and played it through this Magical 8bit Plug which really nails the Nintendo sound from my childhood.

I have a bass guitar I’m borrowing from my father-in-law, but I’ve never done much with it. I picked up a cheap bass multi-effect pedal so I can at least get some decent sounds out of it. I hope to incorporate it into my music – there’s a level of subtlety and expression that’s hard to replicate with synths. It’s a whole new thing, though, and whatever guitar skills I have (i.e. strumming bar chords) don’t really transfer.

3D Printing

My lovely wife got me a Bambu Lab P1S 3D printer for Christmas, and it’s basically been running non-stop since I got it set up. This thing is amazing! It’s whirring away making a pink fox as I type this.

A magenta articulated dragon, a magenta unicorn, and a red toy Jeep sit on a light-colored table, with a plastic storage bin and floral-patterned box behind them. Two bright pink 3D-printed dinosaur figures with white horns and spikes and black eyes sit on a gridded cutting mat.

I’ve started dabbling a bit with Blender to design and print custom stuff. Here’s my first project – the, ahem, “crap catcher” – designed to keep Claire’s fancy kitchen knives free of parrot detritus:

3D modeling viewport showing a long rectangular tray with a tall back panel, low front and side walls, and three rectangular strips along the inside back, rendered with translucent gray surfaces and black edges. An empty red shelf mounted on the side of a gray refrigerator above a magnetic strip holding knives, kitchen scissors, and a honing rod.

Print-on-demand toys are awesome, but there is something really cool about watching a thing you designed enter the real world, layer by layer. I’m keen to try out OpenSCAD (via), which lets you design models with code instead of visually.

Misc.

I found this post (via), “Home is where my stuff is,” deeply resonant:

Here’s what I’ve realized: every object I own is a fossil. A little sediment left by a past version of myself.

This is why decluttering is so hard. It’s not really about tidiness. It’s about deciding which past selves get to stay.

Pairs nicely with another one of my favorites from 2025.

I gave a talk at work about my use of ChatGPT Codex over the last six months. The big takeaways:

Finally, I’d like to take health and exercise a bit more seriously in 2026, and plan to do a separate blog series about it. Look out for that in the next week or so.

That’s all for now. I hope 2026 treats you well, from my adorable family to yours.

Two young children sit together at the top of a playground slide, one smiling and the other leaning close with their tongue out. A smiling man in glasses and a gray robe holds a toddler while carrying an older child on his back, standing beside outdoor steps surrounded by fallen leaves.

This Month

Reading & Listening

References